Game Journal #32 - Ready To Roll

I'm very proud of how much work I got done in this one week.  Last week Lou was halfway drawn, and this week he's all-the-way done and we're able to rebuild the game in the new engine back to where we had it last year on the old engine, plus a few new features! As mentioned before, the second half of a sprite set run is always easier than the first half, because a lot of the sprites are edits from their main weapons. Anyways I've typed a lot about that before so I'm gonna jump right in on this post.

The first thing I did during this week session is do a second pass on Lou's ranged animation.  Lou, Lizzie and Alice used to have their gunfire animated in an old method I used to use- copying the previous frame, lasso selecting and moving parts around to create animation- and this doesn't look so great. Lizzie got a whole new gun animation because her shoulder in the old one was really bad but for Lou I did a sort of rotoscope on his sprites. By drawing over my old sprites I can let the natural variation in my hand's linemaking to give the sprites more life. I'm worried the underlying animation might not be up to standards but for now this works. The only animation in the game that still uses the old lasso method is Lizzie's weaponswitch, which I didn't even notice until this week. If I have time after doing all my other actual pressing artmaking I might be able to sneak that fix into the ECCC build but for now, "it works, its fine".

As I second-pass all the sprites I've touched up their attack animations first because with that concrete I can make the branch-off animations more reliably.  Back attacks are an important feature- one of my goals for a back attack animation is to visually switch weapons in the user's hands so it can flow into mirrored sprites better, and most everyone else with two-handed weapons did so by sliding the weapon around frames 2-3 of their 5-frame cycle, but for Lou I tried something different.  He does a full pivot but his weapon doesn't switch hands until frames 4-5.

When characters are using their non-favored weapons their expressions change for all their animations- Lizzie looks disappointed at having to use a gun, Alice is not as confident at close-range and Monday, well.. he scowls slightly differently with his knife out.  Lou puts on his best warface when the shotgun comes out. He and Lizzie are melee specialists, though, so I didn't want to make them too "cool" when they use guns, and I wanted to give their animation a sense of incompetence to separate them from Alice and Monday's gunslinging. For Lou's back attack he does a pivot to fire both barrels but the shotgun slips out of his hands and knocks him in the chest.  This is his moment to switch hands and make a face. I thought this would be better for his personality than doing a cool Gun Trick, since he's the fast melee boy and all.

Lou's melee throw was a bit of a pain since, like Monday's ranged, both his hands are full.  His ranged throw, on the other hand, was a breeze.  Monday and Alice do a bit of a turn to throw people behind them, but Lizzie and Lou just pick them up and toss them, and Lou doesn't even have to look back.  

He's just like, ayyy get 'em ooouttta here!!  We might not be able to implement throws in time for ECCC but the art assets are ready for when we can get that and I'm really excited to see these animations in practice.

Of all the new animations from this new round of drawing, the dash attacks have been my favorites to draw.  I tried to make them all different and I've had all sorts of rolling, tumbling, punching, kicking and slinging, so when it came to Lou's ranged dash attack I wanted to think of something novel.  He has a hammer on a loop on the back of his belt which has never been addressed to date- that hammer is actually going to be used for his special ability, which is building decoys that look like him or his friends out of garbage (I'm ridiculously excited to draw these, by the way!). So I thought, why not incorporate that into a dash attack?  I made a few compilations of everyone's dash attacks to date, those are all seeable below.  Each one I think reflects the personality of each character, I tried to keep themes with them. If this is your first exposure to the games posts it's a look at how the other characters look:

You can see the weaponswitch animations in action here too.  A fun fact about those: except for Monday's everyone else's is designed to be five frames that work both forward and backwards. The third frame is the midpoint, the end frames are them holding one weapon or the other and frames 2 and 4 are transitions to the neutral mid frame, this way with one set of assets we can accommodate weaponswitching in either direction! Since Monday attacks when he weaponswitches he has two separate animations, but they both start with the same initial animation frame, which is him suddenly having both hands in his coat.

With Lou's new animations done I went back and paid attention to the old zombie attack animations I made.  Midway through building Lizzie's new sprites I learned a new, better way to handle animation smears, to help them look snappier and more impactful. Some ideas I had last year I lacked the knowledge or skill to realize, but going back to apply new knowledge I was able to bring them up to code with the characters' melee attacks

Just like the characters I want all the enemies to have their own personalities as well, albeit slightly simpler and with far, far fewer frames (about 30 compared to 200+ per player-character).  I also upscaled all our older assets to the new higher resolution we're building in; some of those are the Go arrows when an enemy wave is finished.  I made these last year, and at first I thought about a generic gloved hand, but then I thought, what if we make it more personal? 

The idea is that whichever character lands the final hit in a wave gets to be the hand pointing to go forward. As a little bit of trivia, Alice has always been a lefty in the comics.

Anyways, we have most everything we need to build the game for ECCC, it's just a matter of what we can reimplement and bugfix between now and the end of the month. I'm still going to work on new assets for near-future features, which will probably be the bulk of my Patreon post next week. I'll be back on the comic grind as soon as I come home from ECCC, but until then its crunch time.

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